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Recently there was a winter storm and white completely redefined the landscape. I walk out to new visual discoveries. Parallel lines of forked quail prints cross the oval tracks of a lone rabbit. Snow sits fat, frosting dollops on green sugar bush branches and pine needles. Feathered crystal patterns reflect from a puddle.

Mostly I am breath-caught silent by the space around objects, the negative space. It is that tree, that boulder, that view that is now silhouetted and distinct within the whiteness, each is highlighted and suspended for a moment, a day perhaps.

for this post about a body of work. An unfinished body of work it is. Yet, today I’m having trouble seeing the beginning, and the parts that came after. All because I couldn’t remember when, when, when, I painted this acrylic.

I recall the name Day/Night. It’s about opposites in many ways. The visual thinking I see and recall easily. It was a time of exploring tensions between geometric and organic, of the vertical and horizontal, color polarities, all that stuff. When was that? For me, painting is usually a process that morphes into something else with a little of the old, and a bit of a new direction. There are breakthrough works, exploring works and new direction works, it’s always ongoing when the immersion is there. But the dates don’t stick.

You’d think I’d have records. Surely I have records somewhere. It wasn’t the only undated, unrecorded, un-moored painting I found while looking around. This would not be an issue if one documents things. So that’s the catchy title angle. Document, date, ’cause you forget. You forget so much. The sanity you save may be your own.

March pushes brazenly into the canyon. Wildflowers splash with vivid abandon on the hills this year, and the customary wind cuts deep, frantically knocking winter’s junk from pine trees. Accompanying such visual and physical, seasonal flurry, is an atypical silence on the trail. The usually rich warble, chirp, and cheep of the feathered ones have almost disappeared. It’s nesting time.

Gone are the pompous displays of song and plumage from February when the dating game was in full swing. Now, birds are paired up, busy, and strangely quiet. The male raven rarely takes his seat on the telephone pole. Nor is he at the window asking for peanuts. He waddles up the driveway noiselessly, one of his feathers amiss. I like to imagine him tired from feeding his incubating mate. A single blue jay comes foraging, rather than six or ten. No juncos, mourning dove, quail, sparrow or finch forage under bushes. No owls hoot in the dark. Occasionally, a colorful, unidentified stray flies by looking lost.

Soon this interlude will spin into April with new bird, sky antics. We’ll watch lumbering young raven take-offs, and near aerial collisions as parents caw directions; shrill alarmist blue jays in training are sure to chant endlessly, unable to distinguish a ground stick from a snake; and the sweet, versatile trill of the mockingbirds will charm again from tree and shrub. The rhythm sustained.

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Thank you for visiting A Passion for Creativity. Readers are welcome to share this blog, but please do not copy or distribute any images and/or text without my permission. Contact me at joandes@wildblue.net if you have questions or comments.
Copyright 2008-20017 Joan Desmond